Heyzap Reporting Swift Growth

Many would call you crazy if you wanted to start up a big project during this economic recession, us included. But when we first talked with Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila, co-founders of the free casual game site Heyzap, we thought they were geniuses.

Everyone here at GotGame wished the best for the founders of Heyzap when they gave us the exclusive interview a while back. We’re still waiting to hear the words “thank you” coming out of their suave-accented mouths (kidding!), but we don’t blame them; They’ve been pretty busy.

That, my friends, is something we’ve haven’t seen in a long time with the stock market, a spike in improvement! In just 4 weeks after their launch, Heyzap is reporting an explosion of growth. At this point, there are at least 3000 sites with Heyzap on it. Total game play minutes exceeding an average of 5,000,000 mins per month, making 17 minutes of average game play time per user. That’s longer than the time I spend playing the Nintendo Wii!

Of course, there’s a reason for the references to the economy. Truth is, people are staying home more, so entertainment such as video games become vastly appealing. And with the recent surge in popularity for casual games, as well as a constant affinity for free things, Heyzap is making all the right moves.

And growth isn’t just happening statistically, but overall as well. Heyzap is offering a slew of new features. One is that Heyzap now allows publishers to easily choose certain categories of their games that relate to their website, such as basketball games for basketball-related sites. Also, another intergration tool they decided to pull out is API, which allows publishers access to 6000 games, game ratings, descriptions and hi-resolution thumbnails and the ability to pull that content to place on their website. That’s quite a bit of customization, and Heyzap already has examples.

They’ve announced their partnership with Weebly.com and Cooliris.com, providing them with games and creating success stories for all the companies involved. Weebly has a really cool creator tool, where users can drag and drop games into their webpages, while the cooliris browser plugin allows users to start playing casual games immediately! And obviously, don’t stop while you’re ahead. Heyzap is creating even more plugins, such as for Myspace that will come out in due time.

A success story in this day and age? Believe it. Heyzap is doing it. Immad and Jude, put GotGame on the list of sites that use Heyzap.